Panther File Vault : Experiences

inkheadinkhead
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
I'm curious what everyone is experiencing with the filevault.



I recently enabled it, and here is what I've noticed so far:



Mounts a home icon on the desktop, which is really just an encrypted disk image. You can't eject it because it's in use.



When web browsing it seems to access my disk alot. Looking at top shows the disk working.



It seems to be fast other than the annonying disk running issue.



What are your experiences?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 11
    torifiletorifile Posts: 4,024member
    Umm. do you mean panther file vault? Haven't tried it. Not willing to risk my data if something changes between now and the GM.
  • Reply 2 of 11
    inkheadinkhead Posts: 155member
    Yeah my head is all mixed up today. Even with version changeds between b28 and b39 you could get your data back. It's just an encrypted disk image and no matter what you can still decrypt it. So your pretty safe there.



    Quote:

    Originally posted by torifile

    Umm. do you mean panther file vault? Haven't tried it. Not willing to risk my data if something changes between now and the GM.



  • Reply 3 of 11
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Fixed thread title.
  • Reply 4 of 11
    henriokhenriok Posts: 537member
    Since FileVault encrypts everyting in your home directory on the fly, that means that it's also encrypting all of your web cache also and that a lot of disk activity. It's good that performace doesn't seem to ge ta hit though, but that's probably something that varies depending on what equipment one got. A dual G5 probably won't se any hit, but a 233 MHz iMac might



    I hanvn't triet File Vault myself yet.. I guess I'm to chincken to do that before final release. I also have all my third party apps installed in my home directory so I'm pretty sensitive to performance drops.



    If this is a success, is there any possibility for Apple to implement a system wide encryption scheme? There must be cases when such a feature is a must have.
  • Reply 5 of 11
    giantgiant Posts: 6,041member
    Is this true that performance doesn't take much of a hit?
  • Reply 6 of 11
    franckfranck Posts: 135member
    With a good enhanced altivec algorithm, it shouldn't have any performance hit.



    Disk accesses are very slow compared to CPU performance, and I think any G4 could make realtime encryption/decryption.
  • Reply 7 of 11
    moogsmoogs Posts: 4,296member
    Why would FileVault use AltiVec? The encryption part?
  • Reply 8 of 11
    henriokhenriok Posts: 537member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Moogs

    Why would FileVault use AltiVec? The encryption part?



    Yes. Encryption is one of the things that AltiVec is especially well suited for.
  • Reply 9 of 11
    chealionchealion Posts: 16member
    If its accessing the hard drive so much, wouldn't this be a really bad idea for notebook users, who when this was announced was pitched at? Accessing the hard drive so often will just kill the battery very fast.
  • Reply 10 of 11
    curiousuburbcuriousuburb Posts: 3,325member
    maybe it could be set up to only encrypt secure web pages, like banking or others flagged by IP, with https or similar 'security status' markup. unless you're hiding pr0n, or very paranoid, the bulk of casual surfing needn't be encrypted as heavily as a subset which is known to get some already.



    *back to reading The Code Book*
  • Reply 11 of 11
    the cool gutthe cool gut Posts: 1,714member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Chealion

    If its accessing the hard drive so much, wouldn't this be a really bad idea for notebook users, who when this was announced was pitched at? Accessing the hard drive so often will just kill the battery very fast.



    I wouldn't think that accessing the disk would drain your power ... the disk is already spinning. People who use FCP still get pretty good battery life, and their doing disk accessing all the time.
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